Howard’s Course Design Workbook

Howard’s (2001) “Service-Learning Course Design Workbook” serves as a comprehensive tools for designing a service-learning course. We encourage all faculty considering teaching a service-learning course to read this workbook, and use it as a guiding tool throughout your course planning process. The workbook emphasizes that in order for a course to be characterized as having service-learning, it must fulfill the following three criteria.

1) Relevant and Meaningful Service with the Community: Service that is relevant to the community and to the content of the academic course, meaningful to the community and to the students, and developed and formulated with the community

2) Enhanced Academic Learning: Learning that is advanced through an experiential learning activity which either complements or adds to more traditional methods of teaching

3) Purposeful Civic Learning: Learning that contributes to preparing students for community or public involvement in a diverse democratic society, while also preparing students with the knowledge, skills, values, and propensities necessary for such involvement